検索キーワード： 著者 "Eddie Yoon" すべてのカテゴリー

A mediocre category designer will beat a world-class marketer every day of the week. The reason is because all marketing sits within a context. "He or she who frames the problem owns the solution." Without this context—without a category—your marketing becomes nothing but screaming, shouting, and pitching customers with deals, discounts, and other short-term tactics in the hopes of landing a sale.

Over the past 20 years, category creation and category design has gone from being a little-known "positioning" secret from advertising legends like David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Al Ries, Jack Trout, Gary Halbert, and more, to now becoming the single most in-demand skill among business leaders, Fortune 500 executives, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, marketers, and even the next generation of digital creators.

Category Neglect doesn’t come from people being stupid or lacking sufficient data and resources to spot the headwinds and tailwinds of the future. It comes from a refusal to acknowledge which direction the wind is really blowing.

One of the most common questions entrepreneurs and small business owners ask is, “how do I create a category if I’m not a heavily funded startup, or some massively successful company? How can someone like me create a category of my own?” This reveals maybe the single greatest benefit of category design: anyone can do it, at any stage of their life.

In 1973, Martin Cooper invented the cell phone. How? He started with a problem (the Chicago police needed an alternative to bulky two-way radios). He synchronized the magic triangle (product, company, and category design). He executed a lightning strike (a publicized call to his top competitor). And he won the category.

Almost all thinking is reflexive (having an unconscious “reflex” in response) versus “reflective” (taking a moment to consciously reflect on how the past may have created a preexisting mental model keeping you from considering a new and different future).

Christmas is a lightning strike for Christianity (not unlike how Salesforce created Dreamforce, their yearly conference). It happens once per year, and introduces the masses to the POV of Christianity ("Jesus died for our sins") without requiring any real religious participation. If you want to go to Christmas Eve mass, churches are open. And if you just want to Amazon Prime a bunch of gifts for your nieces and nephews and get drunk on spiked eggnog, God bless you!

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this “mini-book” is a goldmine of mental pivots and actionable insights that will help you cut through the noise of your industry and become a voice of thought leadership at scale.

This book is for a very small percentage of business people. You see, most people in business are not trying to use Category Design to create a new category that changes the future and generates exponential new value. Instead, many people in business are trying to “not get fired.” Many people want to go to work, make a contribution, and go home.